No More Sunday School

Pastor’s Epistle—September 2022

There’s really no way to sugarcoat this. Our Sunday School program has collapsed, and catastrophically so.

In AD 2016, we had 84 kids enrolled in our classes. The future looked bright indeed. Five years later, we were averaging two: typically the teacher’s kid and the pastor’s kid. Given the dearth of family participation and difficulty in finding educators, we’ve had to reconsider the entire way that we educate our youth here at St Peter’s. Thankfully we are not alone in this challenge, and other congregations have shown us a way forward.

In several area Lutheran parishes, notably our sister churches in Parkers Prairie and Wadena, Wednesday nights have become a time for intergenerational Christian education; that is, different ages and entire families learning together from one another. What this means in practical terms is that people congregate midweek for (A) a simple meal, (B) a shared faith formation activity, and (C) evening worship.

Congregations that have switched to this model have seen real, if inconsistent, results. In one instance, a Lutheran church that would typically see four children in Sunday School switched to Wednesday nights, and at their first midweek gathering some 19 kids and 17 adults showed up. That’s great, right? But the next Wednesday night they fell back down to perhaps half a dozen; and the Wednesday after that, back up again to the low teens. Regardless, turnout was a lot better than four. Consistency and calm were key.

Our intention for this academic year, beginning with Rally Sunday on 11 September, is to build upon just such a midweek model. We plan to gather on Wednesday nights for a meal at 6:00 p.m., communal education to follow, and vespers at 7:00. We have a large library of activities from which to draw, thanks to the generosity of other pastors—particularly my wife. And we’re hoping to involve our youth in worship, even if we start out with something as simple as a processional with candles. Kids do love fire.

This solves one problem—our difficulty in finding enough Sunday School volunteers—while creating another: namely, meals. If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that people come when there’s food and stay home when there’s not. This is understandable. A church activity without a meal adds one more thing on our evening to-do list, while a church activity with a meal helps to take one off. Besides, food and fellowship have always been integral parts of religion and Christian community.

Church Council is willing to work on some early meals, as am I, but we will need people’s help if this is to get off the ground. And should all go well, we have further plans (as part of our congregational vitality work) for an Advent Academy involving the broader community towards the end of November. The possibilities are exciting.

An added note of caution, however: this Wednesday night program means that the pastor now takes care of all visitation, all worship leadership, all adult education, the Confirmation program, and the Sunday School replacement program largely by himself. This is a recipe for instability: if I’m gone for a week or two, the way things stand now, everything stops.

Moreover, this is not a sustainable model for the long run. I understand that a lot of folks simply are not coming back after Covid. I furthermore understand that, given the stresses of the last few years, many of us are exhausted and don’t want to volunteer for anything more. I get that, believe me, I do. But one pastor and a handful of hard workers cannot a congregation make. We share this life of Christ together; it simply cannot be outsourced to others. And I am not the arbiter of St Peter’s life or death.

We ought to keep in mind that there’s nothing particularly sacrosanct about Sunday School. It was a program invented in the eighteenth century to round up and educate working children and orphans in industrializing cities. Rowdy boys were chained to logs. It was never meant to take the place of parents educating their sons and daughters in the Christian faith at home. Rather, it was for those who didn’t have any parents to teach them basics and the Bible. Perhaps it worked for a time. Perhaps now its time is done.

The good news is that our future lies wide open. We have a lot to be proud of here, a lot to be thankful for. Many congregations would envy all the gifts at our disposal. We will try new things and see what works. We will have faith that, come what may, Christ is with us, He is for us, and He loves us. More than this, we have the sure hope that God does His best work in darkest times, bringing light to the night and life to the dead. Even the grave is but a new beginning, for the Resurrection awaits us all.

In Jesus. Amen.